Flourishes in an environment stable enough to allow continuity of effort, yet diverse and bold-minded enough to nourish creativity in all its subversive forms.

A good idea can be used over and over again and in fact grows in value the more it is used. It offers not diminishing returns, but increasing returns. It can be built upon.

Lawrence Lessing argued that our penchant for overprotecting and overlitigating intellectual property may well serve to constrain and limit the creative impulse.

Creative thinking as a four step process

Preparation: consciously studying a task, and perhaps trying to attack it logically by standard means.

Incubation: the “mystical” step, the conscious mind and subconscious mull over the problem in hard to define ways.

Illumination: the “eureka” step, it’s seeing a new synthesis

Verification or revision: includes all the work that comes after

The Creative Factory

Line workers are often key to making factories greener and more productive at the same time.

They need aptitudes such as problem solving and the ability to work in self-directed teams.

Their creativity should be multidimensional: it could be applied to various problem types.

Creativity versus Organization

Most people have a strong desire for organizations and environments that:

Let them be creative

Value their input

Challenge them

Have mechanisms for mobilizing resources around ideas

Are receptive to both small changes and the occasional big idea

Adam Smith warned that the specialization system – a creative achievement in its own right – has a downside: “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention … He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion.”

Brown and Duguid refer to small groups working together as “communities of practice”. And insist on the need for process and structure to link these communities to one another, transfer knowledge, achieve scale and generate growth.

In The Organization Man, Whyte chronicles how big corporations of the time selected and favored the type of person who goes along to get along, rather than those who might go against the grain, resulting in “a generation of bureaucrats”.

Jacob’s “public characters” are the antitheses of these organization men.